Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

The collegue of mine came across a problem that developed into an interesting solution that I decided to share with the world. Actually, I think the world is pretty much aware of the solution, but just in case that I will ever be looking for this solution again, I’ll have it handy here.

The task at hand was to do some processing of the logs on the fly. The syslog was configured to filter the appropriate logs into a named pipe and a Perl script was written to read from the said pipe and do all the processing.

The original piece of code looked something like this:

open (SYSLOG, "<$named_pipe")
  or die "Couldn't open $named_pipe: $!\n";

while () {
  do_processing($_);
}

close(SYSLOG);

The problem came with syslog daemon restarts. Every time the syslog was stopped, the EOF was sent to the pipe and the script stopped reading it.

[Read more →]

Today’s links belong to one of the two topics - visual arts or technology.

Visual arts (photography, graffiti, posters, and fashion):

• Aerial Photographs of Mexico City — Some of the best aerial photographs I’ve ever seen
  Tagged as: aerial art cool gallery mexico+city photography photos pictures world
• Art Crimes / graffiti.org - The Writing on the Wall
  Tagged as: art culture graffiti images photos
• Banksy — Excellent graffiti art
  Tagged as: art gallery graffiti images
• Philip Treacy - London — Hat designer
  Tagged as: fashion hats portfolio
• A gallery of walls with stuff written on
  Tagged as: art graffiti signs street
• The Mad Hatter — Hats made from the regular paper bags
  Tagged as: bags cool fashion hats paper
• Wooster Collective — Stickers / Posters / Graf / Culture Jamming
  Tagged as: art blog culture graffiti

Technology:

• Slashdot | Google Talk Claims Openness, Lacks S2S Support — Good article on the state of instant messaging
  Tagged as: article blog chat google googletalk icq im jabber livejournal networking protocols
• Slashdot | Five Reasons Not to Use Linux
  Tagged as: computers funny humor linux oss slashdot technology windows
• Xi Gallery :: ACS Datacenter / CO
  Tagged as: computers equipment gallery photos pictures technology
• Xi Gallery :: Classmates.com Datacenter
  Tagged as: computers equipment gallery photos pictures technology
• Zultys Technologies — VoIP products including IP phones, IP PBXs, Ethernet switches, gateways
  Tagged as: equipment neworking phone technology telephony voip

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-30.

id Software has released the source code for its Quake III Arena for the public under the GPL. That is even before Quake 4 has been released! If you’re interested, you can download the source code here.

Now game writers all over the world can unite and produce some really cool games for Linux, Windows, and Mac. Yeah!

Here is a quick tip if you need to merge two AVI files into one using Linux. In fact, you can glue together more than two files. You can glue together as many as you want.

1. Install transcode. Actually check if it is already installed first as many distributions include it.
2. Run the following command: avimerge -o result.avi -i source1.avi source2.avi

avimerge is a part of transcode package.

They say that your unpatched Microsoft Windows machine will live for only 12 minutes on the net before getting 0wned. Now, a lot of people are saying a lot of different things about Windows security, but I tend to agree to this particular one. I’ve seen it plenty of times at work. In fact, we now have a requirement for all colocated clients to fully patch their servers before connecting to our backbone.

Slashdot has a story. And a dup.